CPU Performance Results

We spent a week with the MSI Z77 MPower before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. We verified our power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board and to verify stability. Once completed, we tore down the system, mounted our Noctua cooler, and put the board through the paces.

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The MSI Z77 MPower ended up near the top here, less than a second behind the ASUS Maximus V Formula. Both boards run 3900 MHz on all cores.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, and here the MSI does just as well, situating itself a bit behind the ASUS board.

WinRAR

WinRAR showed a completely different story, with the MSI board posting the highest score of all Intel Z77 Express boards. Not bad!

AIDA64

I use AIDA64's memory benchmark to highlight memory bandwidth. AIDA provided some really weird results that were replicated with repeated benchmarks. Write performance was great, but its other three test-scores were rather unimpressive, with the MSI board sitting on the bottom with all of them.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the MSI Z77 MPower taking the second spot of all Z77 boards.

CineBench Encoding

Again, these results are the same.